Add Action step for merge

[SpencerKaiser]

Pre-requisites

• I looked through both open and closed issues and did not find an existing bug.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Our only build step is within the build-and-release Action, which doesn't run for Pull Requests. As a result, we cannot check for that as a PR gate.

Describe the solution you'd like

Either duplicate the build step elsewhere or split it from that action and create an artifact which can be used within build-and-release. Once this is done, we need add it to our required status checks for main branch protection.